So dropshipping is one of the biggest online business opportunities out there. As you may have seen, tons of people make hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars doing this. But for one reason or another, a lot of people never get started. And maybe the reason for this is because the barrier of entry seems a little bit high. Like sure, all you have to do is make a website and find a product, but sometimes it's easier said than done.
So my goal in this video is to reduce that barrier for you, to show you step by step how to find a product, how to make an online store, and how to do it... the easiest way possible. So ultimately, you can spend less time building out a website and more time figuring out what is the best ad to run and what is the best product to sell.
Once you start testing different things, you can learn more about it. There's a business quote that I learned early on in my business career that always kind of shaped the way I think about things. And that is, the best way to succeed in business is to be in business. Essentially, paralysis by analysis is a real thing.
People sit on the sidelines, they look for the perfect thing, they want to get in at the right time, but ultimately, you're not going to know what the perfect thing is until you just get out there and start doing it and react and learn from there. So the best way to succeed in dropshipping is to start dropshipping, right? Once you do this, you're going to learn a lot more about what works, what doesn't work, and you can iterate a lot and grow to earn yourself hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in revenue or perhaps even in profit. So there's a lot to cover in this video.
I recommend that you follow along click by click or if you're not comfortable with that, at the very least, take out a notepad and a pen. Take notes as we go through this. There is a lot to cover in this video.
We're going to go from absolute beginner, like you don't know anything about dropshipping. We'll talk about what dropshipping is, how to get started, how to build out your website the easiest way possible using a free store builder. Then after that, how to set up the website, make it look really good, set up ads. and then how to iterate and continue on from there.
So this video is going to share a lot of information. This is stuff that some people charge hundreds of dollars for in a course. We're doing it absolutely for free. So if you appreciate the information in this video, we do have links down below.
Some of them are affiliate links. Some of them are not affiliate links. But if you go through those links, it can help us to support this channel and make videos just like this one.
Absolutely no extra cost to you. In addition, the first link we have down there actually does give you a pretty significant bonus when you start. So...
heading over to my laptop, I'm going to start off by going to link number one. I'm numbering all the links down there for this video rather than you having to memorize all of them and kind of lose track. So link number one is santralmedia.com slash Zendrop.
And this actually gives you some nice bonuses when you get started. For example, if we scroll down, it should say $200 in order credits. You're getting that for free.
You're getting 50% off the first three months and you are getting a free theme with this. The theme that they're giving you is based on a theme that normally costs about $300. and i'll explain all of this as we get into it and zendrop's also going to give us a seven day free trial so it really is building our shopify store for free but in essence zendrop right here is pillar number one in your drop shipping you're going to have a couple key things going on so you have your supplier which is zendrop you have your store which is going to be on shopify then you have your ads which we're going to do on snapchat on tick tock and possibly on facebook as well but starting off with the first two pillars the supplier and the store Essentially, the way dropshipping works is you have a product listed on your website.
People find that through maybe an ad or just organically on Google, but when they place an order on your store, you don't actually have inventory, which is great. It means that you don't have a warehouse full of stuff, you don't have big investments in the beginning. Instead, you can sell things that you don't even have right now. And when somebody places the order, automatically on the back end, your supplier is going to place an order from the actual manufacturer and then ship it to the end user.
So with that being said, pillar number one and two, we kind of combine them. Zendrop has an AI store builder, which does make it a lot easier to get started, just much less clicking and much less to do. So that's why we start off with the supplier and that helps us build the Shopify store. So I'm going to enter my email address and my name as well as the payment information. Now, don't be alarmed.
Like if this is not for you, you can just do it now. See what your store looks like and then cancel for free within seven days. Totally like risk free. Don't worry about anything.
Or if you're not comfortable with that either. You could just watch the remainder of the video. And then once you see what mine looks like, then you can decide for yourself. But I think for most people out there, the easiest thing to do is just to sign up now.
Oh, and just in case anyone's wondering, I've actually had several Zendrop accounts. I've canceled some. I've downgraded some.
It really is easy to do. It's not like a click to subscribe call to cancel. So if you decide in like an hour that you don't want to do this, again, it's very easy to just click through and cancel that.
So that'll bring us to the dashboard right here. You can see we have three options. If you already have a store, you can connect it. If you want to build your own store, like I have full tutorials on how to do that, a full Shopify tutorial actually, or what we're going to do right now is claim the free custom built store. So I'm going to continue with that right there, click on continue, and essentially Zendrop has their own theme that they built out.
Like I said before, normally you would have to pay about $300 for the theme that this one is based on, so it gives you that for free. In addition, it kind of saves you a lot of effort, so we have a Shopify account created right now. Now, you want to copy these three things. I'm actually going to blur mine out, but there's email, there's password, and there's your store.
So copy all of those into like your notepad or like, I don't know, Microsoft Word, whatever you save things on. And then we can go and open Shopify store plans. That'll bring us to the next tab here. So that should bring you to a page that looks something like this.
Now we're going to copy over that email. It is a custom Zendrop email. And then copy over the password. We're going to change this login information in a second.
But just for the store builder aspect, it does make it very convenient to just go about doing it this way. So that brings us to our Shopify dashboard. You can see we should have two or three days left in our trial. It says two.
Usually it's three. Regardless, we have now a Shopify store. If we go down to online store and we click on the little eyeball icon right there, it'll show us what our store looks like right now.
And so without having to do anything, you can see this already looks good. Like they already put a couple products in there just kind of demonstrating what the theme is going to be, what it looks like on our store. And so we haven't done anything yet, but we now have a store that is ready to go.
As soon as we find products on Zendrop and add them, it's very easy to do that. They'll show up over here on our store. So you can see just how easy that really is. Now, if you ever did want to change the theme, it's very easy to do that as well. You see we have a ton of themes down here, as well as a Shopify theme library.
You can just browse those, add those if you want. But before we continue... There is actually a password on our website right now on our online store. So you can't actually make any sales. You can't do anything with this until you pick a plan.
So I like doing that up front. Shopify has a bunch of different plans for $1, but don't be fooled by that. After they renew in a couple months, it's $29.79 or $299.
And I think most people watching this video are going to be best off just going with the basic one, at least in the very beginning. Once you scale up and make more sales, I do have a tool. I'll link it down below. I think I'll call it link number five. And this is going to be a Shopify plan comparison tool.
Essentially, after you start making more sales, 2.9% in credit card fees versus 2.7% in credit card fees, that little 0.2% difference could actually be more than the $50 per month difference between these. So once you get to a certain point, it does make sense to upgrade. If not for the other features, at the very least, just because you will be saving money, on those credit card processing fees same thing with advanced once you scale even beyond that i recommend checking out that tool it's just like google sheets it's not like any kind of like email collection or anything like that it helps you decide in the future when it's time to upgrade but we're starting off with basic right this is a brand new store basic is exactly what we need and again i'm going to enter my credit card information and say subscribe great now we successfully subscribed now we can enter our business details so we'll have an address here save the business address and that brings us back to our shopify dash Okay, cool.
So now we have those two pillars set up. We have our supplier, we have our store. The next thing before we really build out either one of those is going to be to find a product. And this is a big part of the research here.
And Zendrop actually does have quite a few tools built in. So by going through that process we did in the very beginning of signing up for the free trial, we have access now to a ton of Zendrop features on here that are very powerful, including the ability to find products, see what's working very well, trending products, as well as requesting other products as well. If there's some product that you think would be a great product to sell, but you can't seem to find it, we can go through this right here and source a new product. I'm not going to touch on that too much in this video, but I will go through all of these on the left side, starting off with that product research. Going down here to trending products is kind of a cool spot to start, in my opinion, just to at least get an idea of what's selling very well.
And there are a couple key things you want in a good product. Some things that are product specific and some things that are more based on the niche. So in general, starting off, with the category of product you're looking for, you're going to look for products that have a very strong fan base, people that love the product, that are willing to spend a lot on it. This could be like golf is a great one, pets are a great one, any kind of family-related things. People love stuff like that and they're willing to spend money on it.
The second thing is you want to find a niche that is generally popular among a category of people who have disposable income. So again, people who have pets probably do have a little bit more money because... Let's face it, pets aren't cheap.
You're already paying for pet food every month. You're paying for your pet to go to the vet. People who have pets are more likely to have slightly more income and be more willing to spend money on, you know, something like a dog toy or something like that.
Additionally, a third aspect of a very strong niche would be that that niche is growing. And there are some great tools out there. One that I really like is Google Trends.
So if we go to trends.google.com, we can look up some trends based on different niches. And so if I say golf. for example, and you look at, let's say we want to see the golf searches on not just the whole internet, let's look on YouTube in general.
And we want to say golf searches from 2008 to present. And you can see there is an upward trend in golf on YouTube right now. So it is becoming more popular.
And that's a good thing. Like you want to find a niche that is not like crash. ...and dying, right?
If we say, for example, fidget spinner, something that had an obvious peak in like 2017, you can see this is not a good niche to get into because it is not something that people are searching anymore. So that's not the best example of a niche, but again, an example of where you want to look to find different categories. Google Trends is going to be your friend there, and you can search based on different parts of the world.
You can search based on web search, image search, or YouTube search, some of the popular ways that I look at things. And it's kind of a good idea to gauge... How popular is something?
Is it growing, which you definitely want to get on, like a rising tide is going to be positive? Or is it something that is currently shrinking and you don't want to get into that? So those are the niche specific things. Now focusing on the category, there are a couple things that you want to keep in mind.
For one, you want to make sure that this is not something that gets a lot of returns. So what could get a lot of returns? Anything that either doesn't fit, so maybe it's like a fit specific thing like clothing, that can be a little bit trickier.
Maybe it's something that is likely to break either when they open the box or during shipping. So very fragile things, glass things, you might not want to go with that. Or any kind of things that are likely to either be confusing or require customer support. So some tricky, some electronics can be a little bit trickier, and I would advise avoiding those. Although other electronics can be great.
If you're talking about like an alarm clock that charges your phone and has cool lights, that might be a little bit simpler, a little bit like it's been around for a long time. much less likely to break or be confusing to people. And I think those kind of products are still okay. But that is one thing you want to consider.
The second thing, you want to find something that is in the right price range, which Zendrop does a great job of showing these, where they are essentially an impulse purchase. So it's something that people want, but at the same time, if it's like a $25, $35, $40 product, they could be on Instagram late at night, maybe... late on a weekend.
You know, they had a couple drinks, they're just hanging out, they want to purchase something. You don't want something that's like $500 and then later they realize, I should not have bought that and they cancel the order. You want something to be a quick little impulse purchase that genuinely does help their life and they really like, but you know, again, it's a little bit more of an affordable product in that aspect.
And of course, you want this to be something that is easy to ship. You don't want to spend a ton of money shipping out dumbbells if you're selling like lead weights or iron weights. Like obviously, it's going to be very expensive for people to get that shipped to them. So they'll either be deterred by the shipping cost or if you absorb that cost and make it free shipping, they're going to be deterred by the massive price tag that it has.
So a lot of these trending products definitely fit that bill. For example, these heated socks, like $5, you can maybe sell them for like $35, $40, something like that. And this is something that if it does work, that could be a great product. Now, one other little thing I just thought of that I should have mentioned with the products, make sure you're not getting something that could potentially hurt anybody.
obviously for moral reasons, but also for lawsuit reasons. You don't want to be selling anything that, you know, people end up getting like shocked with or electrocuted. So I don't know enough about this product. I would love to research it more.
If it looks safe, if it looks like a simple product that can't hurt anyone, then that could potentially be a great product because it checks all of those other boxes. It's small and easy to ship. It's the right price.
It is something that is novel and new and exciting. I think a lot of people, especially in the winter, remember... which right now I'm filming this in August. It might be a good time to kind of get into that.
In the next couple of months, people are going to be buying more warm socks and winter stuff. That kind of product could do very well. Although, like I said, it is very seasonal.
So it's probably not going to do well in the summer. These products, honestly, are all really great ideas. That's why they're trending.
So like the car one, I think that I've seen a lot of people, specifically if they have like a Tesla or anything that has seats folding down and it, you know, works very well for sleeping in, that could be great for selling this kind of idea. I think a lot of people don't have that but would love to sleep in their car sometime. This one is a huge one.
I've actually had one of these. I bought them on Amazon and it is for sleeping on a plane. For me, it actually deflated a lot. Like every time I bought one, I think I had two or three and they all deflated within like a day.
I mean like they popped. Like they completely were flat. They had a hole in them after a day.
And so I wouldn't want to sell anything like that. The plant watering thing, if that's what this is, what is this? A transparent double layer self-watering flower pot.
that sounds cool if it looks cool like if you can see i guess like the water in there and maybe you can see some roots i'm not sure exactly what this is why it's transparent um but again for 1.17 you could maybe sell this for you know 20 get a good amount of profit you know cover the shipping in there as well and possibly have a good product in there so i'm going to spend the next maybe 30 minutes to an hour of just browsing through all these different products see which ones make the most sense which ones i think look good and then we're going to add those to the store it's also worth mentioning that zendrop is your friend here. And when you upgrade to the plus plan, they give you a lot of resources that are going to help you succeed, not just in regards to like branding and boxes and stuff like that. But also down here, some other things we have like Zendrop Academy, which again, is going to kind of self explanatory here, it's going to give you a lot of resources that help you learn and kind of guide you along the way. So Once you get to a point where you're like, all right, I want to make TikTok ads or Facebook ads or, you know, talk about scaling.
These are all kind of like nice little checklists and guides that, I mean, I'm going to talk about a lot in this video, of course, but anything else that you might not get in this video would potentially be in Zendrop Academy, as well as if we go back here, there are also live coaching calls. So you're able to ask questions, you know, type in your questions and they answer for you. So a lot of these extras, I highly recommend. go through these, check them out, and kind of figure out what is going to work for you, what resources are actually available. Like I said, these are all very valuable.
A lot of people are tempted just to find a product, connect it, and then basically never come back to Zendrop. But the truth is, you know, Zendrop, their incentives are aligned. If you succeed, they succeed.
If you fail, then they lose the subscriber. So their goal is to get you to be as successful as possible with your store. All right, so I found about four ideas that I might want to run with for this video. The first one...
I'm a little biased here because it's something that I personally don't have and I would like to have and that's a foldable toiletry bag. I know a lot of people do have these. I think they're very popular.
It would make a great gift. It's kind of the right price so you could sell this for like I don't know maybe $20. Get a lot of people to buy this and especially coming up around like the holidays.
It's like a very easy stocking stuff for anyone who's like they can get it for their spouse. They can get it for like a gift for anyone else or just for themselves. It just seems like something that pretty much everybody could use. Everyone is traveling to at least like maybe a friend or relative's house if not going on like your own vacation or traveling elsewhere so i think this is a product that could potentially you know appeal to a really wide audience it's also fulfilled by zendrop it's two dollars and thirty cents somehow so very very low cost there the total is going to be seven dollars after shipping so we can do free shipping and like i said charge maybe like twenty dollars fifteen twenty dollars twenty five dollars for this and uh that would be i think a pretty good start for this product Another idea was this vacuum sealer for mason jars. I think it's a really cool little product.
I don't know how well it would work. It is something that could potentially have some returns if it doesn't work perfectly. But being just a simple little air pump that charges by USB, I think a lot of people like a lot of this product probably should be just fine. Once again, fulfilled by Zendrop. So shipping should be very quick.
The total after shipping is $25. So the margins would be a little bit trickier on this one, we would have to sell it for a pretty high price tag. uh regardless this is something that anyone who's meal prepping is kind of the route i was thinking anyone who's meal prepping might appreciate this where they can make more meals in mason jars and kind of keep them fresher throughout the week in their fridge we have this right here a very very low cost so it would be hard to sell this for enough to make it worth uh worth the while so you're spending most of your money on shipping here actually and so once you factor in like the ads for it how much are you really going to charge for this on every door in someone's house I think it's going to be a little tougher to get the right margins on this, but it is a really cool product.
It's something that, like you picture little kids who kind of just grab the bottom of the door handle, pull it down and get out. This kind of locks it so they can't do that, but an adult who can easily reach the top is able to get out quite easily. So it's kind of just childproofing your doors. I think that's pretty cool.
Definitely a neat idea. But again, it's something that, like not every door is exactly a style, so it might be a little bit more of a niche product. and then we have this one right here i absolutely am confident that so many people out there every car i ever get into nobody has a fast charger maybe newer cars have usb type c in them but most people are using those really old car chargers that charge at like five watts or even less and so this right here a lot of people don't even know their car is capable of charging faster than five watts it definitely is uh and so this right here is a i think up to like 36 watts is what it says right here uh combined 36 watts so I think it was like 24 watts or something like that, 24 watts for one port.
So it's going to charge your phone a lot faster. It's something that, personally, I really appreciate having. I actually have one from Anker. So it is worth cross-checking here. Anker is selling this for about $36 or $40 is the MSRP on that.
But they do also have a cheaper one for $16. So being that this one here is $9, it's going to be $11 after shipping, actually. It's something that... I mean, if you sell it in two pack, totally worth it, because then you're looking at $16.
That's $8 a piece after shipping, something you could maybe mark up to like low to mid 20s. I think that's definitely a reasonable price for something like this for an individual one. And double, of course, you could just charge maybe like $40 or so for that. And I think that definitely is a product that could make sense.
But for the purposes of this video, I really want to just go with whichever one has the best marketing material. So this one looks good. but i'm going to go with the toiletry bag i just think it's something that more people could really benefit from myself included and so maybe a little bit of bias there but i would love to test this product out and see how well it can actually sell so i'm going to add to my products and then on the left side you'll see my products i'm going to click on my products and you'll see one right there now just in case you wanted to kind of research a bunch maybe add this to my products maybe i add them all to my products i could do that right here And they're not all going to be published until you go over to that first tab, like I said, and click on my products.
And let me just refresh it. You'll see all the other ones show up. They all show up right here.
And once you decide, all right, I like these. I definitely want this one, the toiletry bag. I can review and publish. So here you can change the name of it.
So we'll give it a name. We can choose the collection for that. If we have, so we choose the name, we can choose a collection. We can add a tag on here. If you have more products tagging, it would make a lot of sense.
We can change the description as well. And for the description, you could very easily just use ChatGBT to have it write out a better description than this. And then as far as variants go, we have three colors.
You can see the product cost, the shipping, and then the price that we're selling them all for. So it's recommending we're selling them for $22.20 each. The profit then is going to be $15.13.
So maybe we want to make this more of a rounded off number. We're going to call this like $22.95 for all of them. $22.95.
And that brings the profit. almost to $16 each. So not a huge profit, you may want to experiment with a higher or a lower price with this and see how they sell if you're able to get more money for it. If you have better ads, that definitely could be you know, it would be great if you could do that. But let's say publish to my store right now.
So here we're going to just confirm that yes, it's not guaranteed that it is going to be shipped immediately. But you know, we want it to be shipped as fast as possible. We do have these other products that are on our store, they were like the AI ones that just kind of showed up. Maybe you like them like the smart kitchen spatula, kind of a cool little idea.
But let's go back and check out our store right now. Now that we added the premium men's toiletry bag. So if I go to my store again, let's just kind of refresh this, make sure it's up to date. And if I go to products here, you go to products, you'll see that has now been added down there.
So we have all these products here. If you decide you don't like any of these products, we can just select them on Shopify. Very easy to do.
So like fitness studio, maybe you don't want. like the portable AC fan, we can select them, click on the three dots and delete the products. We can delete those products and now they will no longer be on our store.
So now that'll bring us down to just, you know, half as many products as we had, but I really just want to focus on this one right now. So maybe I'm only working with one product. I can select the other ones as well.
Just kind of selecting through these. I'm actually going to keep that one. I think this batch is kind of a fun idea. So I'm going to, again, delete those. We'll delete the products, say delete.
And that will bring us down to simply two products. If we go down to the online store now and we click on view your online store, it looks a little bit different. You can see bestsellers. We only have the two products here because, you know, those are the only two on our site.
That is how they're set up. Additionally, there's not more you really have to do, like not more you have to do, but there's more that I do want to do, right? So technically somebody could come to the site. They could click on this. You can see the whole product page is ready to go.
They can add it to their cart. they can navigate the entire checkout you see this little thing about free shipping up there we can configure that all later but this is all something that we haven't done yet we haven't done anything yet and uh it we already have reviews on here everything looks like very very professional so let's kind of customize this a little bit more on the actual home page so from our shopify tab here right we're on the shopify tab and we can go back to home it probably looks like this if you just go to shop admin.shopify.com But we want to go down to the online store. Click on online store and next to the theme, you should see a button that says customize. So let's click on customize and this is going to allow us to edit the website.
Now this website is built with what we call a section layout. So there are a bunch of sections stacked on each other. Each one is just like a horizontal banner if you want to think of it as that.
So we have this first section right here just showing us like what the trends are. That is an image banner. I'm going to collapse that. On the left side, this is our hierarchy. On the right side is our website.
So the first one is an image banner. The second one is our featured collection. So this is all one section right here, as you can see right here.
Then we have another image banner. So this is another image banner with some text on top of it. Collapse that. Then we have a featured product down here, as you can see over on the left side.
And below that, we have a couple other things that we'll get to in a minute. But let's talk about how to edit any one of these. For example, the... the product right here the featured product on the left side if i click on featured product it brings us into an editing interface for this product so i can choose a different product that is going to be featured right now i can click on change i can remove this product and i can select a new one and for this of course i am going to select the the toiletry bag that we just had i'm going to say select and that now adds it in to our website if i click the little back icon up on the top There are a couple other things we can edit within this section.
So we have a title here. I could remove it. I could hide it.
I could change it. We could move things up and down. So if, for example, you want to have the price lower, you can take price, click on that, and just simply drag it down there.
And the price is going to be on the bottom. I don't think it makes much sense to keep the price there. So I would rather have it.
right up there, or perhaps below the variants as well. It doesn't really matter. Somewhere in that area looks best to me. And then for any individual element in this section, for example, the variant picker, if I want to edit that, I click on it and I can change, are they circles? Are they squares?
Are they going to be a dropdown? Or is it going to be pills? I think the pill icon kind of looks better for something that only has three options like this, three variants. And I think this ultimately looks pretty good as is, and I'm not going to change much here.
But... there is one thing you could change depending on how the product looks and what the theme looks like and if it has a background on that image and that is essentially the style of this entire section so featured product if we click back into that we have multiple different schemes on this website we can customize what the schemes are but looking at this we can see we have six different schemes right now and each one is going to have slightly different colors for the button the font the background things like that so scheme two as you can tell is going to change it up quite a bit. Now, it doesn't look good with this background, but I'm just saying that if you have, you know, some product that has a green background, maybe you want to choose a scheme that matches the green in the back.
So I'm going to go back to scheme one here. That makes the most sense for this individual product. But if you ever did want to change that, before we edit anything else on the site, let's talk about how to edit the color schemes that we have available.
So on the left side, like all the way on the left side, you'll see this tiny, like three little icons here. One is going to be the sections. That's our hierarchy that we have been looking at. Below that, we have theme settings.
The theme settings are going to be, like I was talking about, the logos, the colors. That's what we want to change right now, as well as a bunch of other things that kind of dictate the general things that show up across your entire website. For example, animations or the shadows or different things like that.
So let's start off with this color scheme right here. Maybe I don't like scheme 2 and I want to change it. You can click on that. And then for every individual color, so the background color, the text color, the solid button color, you can just click on that color and change it to whatever you want.
And if you have a logo already that you just know you want to use or a color scheme, maybe you made one in Canva, for example, it's something that you can just paste in the HTML color right there. And if you don't know what the HTML color is, go to Google and just type in HTML color code identifier, color code identifier. And you'll find sites like this one for maybe this one right here, where you can just paste your image or upload your image.
And then it'll just tell you what the color is. So let's just do it maybe for this logo right here. If I just hover over this blue and I click on it, or let's click on that blue right there, you can see color code down there.
I can copy this and then back to our store. I'm able to just paste that color code in the hex, the HTML right there, and it will change it to this color. I think I have a space in the beginning.
All right, so I'm going to undo that, leave it as is, and I think it doesn't look too bad. But now let's kind of talk about a couple other things we can change while we're in these general settings right here, the theme settings. So the logo, we can add our logo in here. Like I said, if you already have one, that's great. If you don't have one, I recommend making one very quickly in Canva.
So we can do that right now. If we go to a new tab, go to canva.com. It's free to use. You can upgrade if you wanted to. But...
Ultimately, the free one does a pretty good job. So I'm going to sign into my Canva. And from Canva, I could just say maybe this is going to be travel, travel logo, because, you know, it's kind of a travel gear kind of thing. Let's see what they have as far as travel logos go.
So these more travel oriented. This one looks pretty good. I kind of like that idea there. This one's not too bad. So maybe I'm going to go with this one right here.
Just this logo. I'm going to work off of this template and maybe I want to call this kind of based on that one product. We can keep it generic in case we want to change the products in the future, but kind of sticking with that niche of like traveling, I'm going to call this, maybe we are like, let's say the Travel Bros.
The Travel Bros, Travel Brothers. We can change the font on here. So let's roll with that, a pretty simple font. I'm going to actually remove the background though to make sure we have no background on here. And we can share this.
We can download this. By the way, I have a full tutorial on how to use Canva if you ever wanted to get into the weeds on how to make your own logo. It's a really powerful tool.
Like I said, free to use. You have to pay to upgrade to like download transparent background if you want. You can always just download with white background and use like background removal tools.
I think Adobe Express has a free one. So that's pretty convenient. But otherwise, I'm just going to download this right now and go back to and go. and go back to our site i'm going to select an image for our logo i'm going to add an image by uploading it and then once that's done uploading i'll say done and our logo is now added so that's pretty convenient now we have a nice professional looking logo on the top the travel bros by the way i highly recommend if you choose any kind of name or slogan like that you go to the uspto search just look for uspto search on google and that is the u.s patent and trademark search so you can just say trademark search and say we are the travel bros what we want to call it so travel travel bros and you'll see if there's anything so passport bros that could put that could potentially be competitive so you want to make sure that you know you're not too similar to anything uh you know you don't want to get sued you don't want to be stepping on anyone's toes so always find something that's original it's not hard to do there's so many things out there all right so now we have that now before we go on and do anything else while we're here we want to change the favicon image that's going to be on the top so i'm not sure if you can see that on my browser here but on the top you'll see you have like shopify's logo right here you have zendrops over on this other tab and that's something that your website will have as well so if anyone's on your site They're going to see just the Shopify logo up there. That's not a good look.
You want to have your logo up there. So I'm going to select that image again. We'll select that one. In that way, that's going to show up on the top of the browser for anyone who's on our website. Again, you can go down here and check out all these other things.
I recommend going through every single one and just kind of making sure that it makes sense for like the feel of your website. The animations don't look too kitschy or anything weird. But for the most part, everything's pretty good out of the box.
So I'm going to... go back to sections on the top on the top left there and here we can start editing a little bit more about this website so maybe at the very top instead of this thing that says where trends thrive and then the best sellers maybe we just want to have our featured product on the top and if you want that the way you reorganize these sections is with this hierarchy on the left side so similar to how we're reorganizing elements in the in the featured product section we can reorganize these sections by clicking and dragging them up and down so the little six dot array that pops up when you hover next to a product or or a section rather you can click that and drag it up and let's put that on the very top so now we have the premium men's travel toiletry bag showing up on the very top that's our website ultimately that is usually what people like to do that's a very common practice there to just put on the top make it very purchasable from your home page and then down here it works well if you add a lot of additional details why somebody would want to buy it. Maybe a little bit of like our story.
That's a good one. If you talk more about like what your company is, maybe you donate like $1 from every purchase to like buy travel bags for kids in less fortunate situations. I don't know, anything like that. You get the idea of how you'd want to add a story somewhere else on your site.
So let's add the our story a little bit higher here. I do kind of like the our story option. So I believe it is this one here.
This is what it is. Our story, there we go. So we have an image there, our story on the right side.
So that's, I don't know, pretty well set up. I kind of like that. So this is image with text.
Let's click on this and drag it up below featured product. So you can see, you know, that's the toiletry bag, our story. And then let's click into that and kind of customize that a little bit more.
So clicking into that, we can change that image. Let's say select from the library or you can just explore free images as well. There are a bunch that we have to choose from. So this could be like a shop local. This could be men's fashion.
Let's see if we have one for travel. Let's just search for travel. All right, so maybe this image looks good and we can change the orientation of it. So you can have, if it's a little wider, if it's a little narrower. So wider looks kind of weird.
I like keeping it narrow on desktop. And then down here, we can have, maybe it's going to be on the top, the middle, the bottom. You can reorient where everything is right here for like the text and stuff like that. So I'm gonna keep this centered. Actually, I'm gonna keep this on the left.
I think that looks pretty good with the photo right there. And if we want to change anything as far as text goes, we click on the back icon. And then down here, you'll see our story.
So that's going to be the title right there. And then below that, you can see the paragraph that's written right there. So you're kind of building this out one thing at a time.
For the most part, Shopify is very easy to edit. Simply all you have to do, click on whatever you want on the left side. Everything pops up below it. So you can expand like this section, for example. Or let's talk about something else.
Let's go down here. This is three different columns. So you'll see multi-column. And then each column, again, you just click on it.
It brings you into there. You can change the title. You can change the description.
You can add a link in there. If you want to have maybe a little button or some action called action on the bottom, you can add an image above each of those as well. So it's pretty straightforward on how to do that.
And I do have a full tutorial on the ins and outs of every single element in Shopify. If you want to see that, I'll have that linked down below. It's just a YouTube video, of course. And that goes into so many more details on how to do this.
Now, as a side note, I want to give you a quick crash course of the rest of this interface. I showed you on the side that we have the sections right there, as well as the theme settings. Below that, we have app embeds. You really don't have to worry about that too much right now.
But across the top, we have our different sites or different pages on our site. So if you want to check out the product page, if you want to check out a gift card. page, the cart, maybe a blog page, an about us page, or if you just want to create new pages, you can manage that up on the top by clicking on the drop down for the page. And if you want to go and check out maybe like, you know, the product page, a default product page, this is what it looks like. And you can edit that as well.
So let's go back to home. Next to that, you'll see we have this desktop, mobile and full screen view. It's very, very, very, very important. I cannot emphasize this enough that you check out your website on mobile. This is where almost all of your customers are coming from, especially if you're advertising on social media, on TikTok, on Snapchat, on Facebook, or Instagram.
This is where they're going to be coming to this from a phone, is what they're going to be doing. And you want to make sure your site looks good on a phone. So this picture, it looks completely different here than it does on desktop.
Ultimately, I think it looks better here actually. But you know, just you want to keep that in mind when you're designing your site. Design it on desktop, go to mobile and make sure it looks good on mobile. Then, of course, you want to always click save.
There's also the undo button in case you ever need that. But always click save as frequently as possible so you don't lose your work. But I think for now, most of you probably have a pretty good idea of how to make your website look pretty good, right? I think that's kind of the fundamentals I just showed you. And for the most part, that's really all you need.
So don't get too hung up on making your website look perfect. You just want to make it look good enough that everyone's going to go here, feel confident to buy, and they're going to make the purchase that they came to make. Remember, like I said earlier in this video, the key to dropshipping is iterations.
You want to test out a ton of different products. You want to test out a ton of different ad styles. You want to be able to move fast and iterate and test different things. And getting too hung up on exactly the details, the ins and outs of the bottom banner of your about page on your website is probably not ultimately going to convert that many more sales compared to your time being spent instead on iterating and making better ads. or otherwise iterating and finding other products that could work on your site.
So that right there is the fundamentals of how to make the site. You can certainly add more products onto your site, but there are a couple other very important things we need to do for this site before we actually are able to get any customers. One of them is, of course, accept payments. If somebody comes to this right now, sure, the site looks pretty decent, but there's no way for us to accept their payments. So let's go up here and click on Save.
So let's click on Exit on the top left. and we can go down to settings. Now, within our settings, the first thing I want to do is change the name of my store.
I'm going to click on the pencil icon and we can change this to the travel bros. And we can also change the email now as well. So instead of that kind of weird, funky email that Zendrop gave us, you can use your own email. It's great for signing in.
So nobody's going to be guessing your password or anything like that because I think they do all come with the same like admin. one two three whatever password so start off by changing your email i think that's very important then say save otherwise going through this we now have our store set up you can change the way your order ids are set up i think it's fine like this it just has a number you don't have anything at the end but if you wanted to say uh maybe it's going to be like order order number order number dash like uh e n or something i don't know whatever like that that's how your orders can actually be numbered and set up with a prefix and a suffix i think the number Really just works fine. I'm just going to leave it like that.
Going down, you can see we have some other things you can change, some basic features there. But let's go down and talk about, like I said, the payments. That's incredibly important.
If we click on Payments, we can first set up Shopify Payments. That's the main way you'll be accepting credit cards. It accepts Apple Pay, Google Pay, MasterCard, Visa, Discover, Amex, all the really fundamental ones that most people would be paying with, you can accept.
So let's go and submit the details. and this could be either details for yourself or for your business if you have an llc then you can easily set that up as a registered business right here if you don't you might want to consider doing that some people do prefer an llc or other business structures as well this is not legal advice of course but there are some really easy ways to set up an llc for you know not that much money at all otherwise if you are just an individual you could set this up as an individual here i believe you'll be using your social security number instead of a business ein But no matter what you do, just select the one that pertains to you and then say next. All right. So now that we have our Shopify payments set up, you'll see you'll end up on this page right here. We are going to turn on two step authentication so we can just say turn on.
Now we'll have to sign back in. Then you simply download any authenticator app you like. There's Google, Microsoft and many others out there. Then scan the QR code and enter the six digit code generated down here.
and that'll bring you back to a page that looks like this now it'll refresh and might say pending for a little bit in the beginning you'll see right now it's creating the account but eventually it will show up and show shopify payments there now while this is being set up you'll notice right here amazon pay is deactivated depending on how long you wait you might see like amax discover all these different credit cards everything that all these payment methods will be accepted but by default for some reason amazon pay is deactivated i don't understand why shopify does this It's something that I think a lot of people overlook. They don't even realize it's grayed out. It's very easy to activate. It doesn't cost you anything.
And it could drastically increase the number of sales you have by lowering the barrier for potential buyers. So anybody who has an Amazon account, they probably have a payment method stored. They have an address stored. And they trust Amazon a little bit more than some new website they are visiting.
So by enabling this, that means anyone who goes to your site, they're able to quickly make a purchase without having to type in their credit card. without having to trust you as much and without having to type in their address by using their amazon account especially on mobile is incredibly easy to do so in order to enable that what i recommend doing is going up to manage on the top right That'll bring you to this page right here, and you'll see manage payment methods on the top. So click on manage payment methods, and all you have to do is go down to Amazon Pay. For some reason, where is Amazon Pay? There it is.
For some reason, it is toggled off by default. Again, I don't know why that is, but just toggle that little switch on. So for our domain, I'm going to look at the travelbros.co maybe, or you could say.so or.io.
There's a lot of endings you need to, and a lot of them are going to be fairly affordable. $31 here is a little bit higher than I would like, I think, typically between like. 15 and 25 a year is really ideal but because i do really like this let's just check out maybe like dot io see if that's any different or dot so let's see what dot so looks like yeah whatever dot co is still good i'm gonna say by domain it's just easier to do it this way than other platforms out there because you don't have to go about connecting and modifying your dns and anything like that it's just already connected it's easy to do through shopify and that's why i typically recommend doing that going down here you can check your contact information you and then just say buy domain. There we go. So now we have the travelbros.co.
SSL is currently pending for that, but let's close out of this. Now, continuing down our settings, you can allow customers to create accounts if you wanted to make it easier for like self-serve returns that would limit the amount of time you have to spend managing returns or hiring other people. So that could be something that was, you know, potentially a very big benefit of making customer accounts.
Shipping and delivery, we don't have to worry about that because we are doing drop shipping. Taxes and duties, of course, speak to your local accountant. and figure out what you need to charge based on the region you live in additionally we have locations markets domains we talked about all this different stuff here customer events notifications i'm not really going to talk about much of this stuff in this video right now except this down here this is very important and it's something that i really like about shopify in particular if you click on policies most websites out there you will want to have a policy your return policy your privacy policy different things like that and so for all of these let's just say our return policy we can click on this And Shopify does give us a template to work with, kind of by default, like everything that they're going to show you, you read through it, it's like, all right, basic 30 day return policy, pretty straightforward, pretty sample, pretty standard, I'm going to insert this template.
And I'm going to say save. So I like that one right there. Then we have our privacy policy automated.
That's what it's showing right there. Again, I think that looks good. We have our terms of service, we can insert this template if we like this.
So we'll say save our shipping policy, same thing that is already set up right there. And then down here, our contact information. So all of these, I think, do look pretty good by default.
I'm not going to change anything in them, but of course, read through them because these are your policies that you're saying for your store. And you want to make sure that you understand what the policies you're stating to be yours actually are. Now, let's close out of this. And we kind of have a lot set up so far.
We have our product. We have our store. We have our domain.
We have, you know, almost everything set up. But there are some other really important things we need to consider. And those are in relation to. discounts and marketing. Then after that, we'll talk a little bit more about analytics, but really discounts and marketing are a huge aspect of getting sales, especially with dropshipping.
Probably one of the most difficult parts is going to be marketing, finding and creating the best ad out there. And fortunately, you don't actually have to be good on camera. There are some fantastic tools that we found. So let's check out the discounts first. So we're going to discounts.
This is something that I think is very beneficial to set up, but you don't have to just set it up here. Although I'm just going to start off by showing you the manual way to do it. So if we say create discount, you can say, hey, let's just give maybe like percent off a product.
This is the most basic one out there. And if you have some kind of collection, you want to run an ad and you want to, you know, promote some kind of little discount in there, you could very easily set that up right here by saying maybe like fall 10 and maybe they can save 10% off of any collection. Or we could say all, you know, specific collections, specific products. Let's just say out of all of them, let's say all of our products here.
can be discounted 10% if they use that discount code right there. We could have an MOQ on here. We could have customer eligibility.
We can have maximum usage of them. You can really limit a lot of things, including the start and end date of these. But just for a basic one, I can then say save. Now, with this, like I said, you have a lot of flexibility here. So if we go back to discounts, you can create them not just based on a certain amount, but you can say maybe buy one, get one, buy two, get one.
You can have amount off your order. So if they order more than... a hundred dollars they can get five dollars off ten dollars off or you could have free shipping on an order based on certain criteria if they you know reach a certain minimum order threshold or anything like that now for these i would really recommend kind of just sticking with the basic one up top maybe these two right here the site you know buy one get one is kind of nice or buy two get one because you are limiting your shipping costs a little bit especially if you know one customer is ordering multiple products but That is not the only way to make discounts, like I said. The other one is within the marketing tools we have available. So down here, if we click on apps, right now, we don't really see any apps.
Of course, we do have Zendrop down there, but we don't have it pinned over to the side just yet. But an app that I want to recommend right now is actually called OmniSend. So let's go to a new tab and type in Santrell, santrellmedia.com slash OmniSend.
But OmniSend is a good way to automate your emails. They also offer SMS as well. And so... some of the big advantages here for one it's all very easy to set up you don't have to worry about configuring these automations as you previously had to do just a couple years ago now it's just one click and it sets up a nice one for abandoned cart for example where if anybody goes to your store they want to place an order and then who knows maybe the doorbell rings they get distracted they don't place that order then you can send them an email within one day two day two days or even three days and kind of have a flow I'm going to say start for free and we can sign up for OmniSend. So I'm going to sign up with Shopify right now because we do have our Shopify account already signed in here.
We can log in. You'll know you're logged in because you'll see your icon on the top right or at least the name of your business. And we can just say install.
That'll bring us to a new tab. This brings us back to the Shopify admin page. We can agree to install this.
Now we can create our OmniSend sign in. So password, our first name, last name and agree. Now we can add our assets for this particular store, starting off with our logo. So I'm going to upload a logo, say upload from computer.
And remember, we did just make a logo in Canva not too long ago. There we go. I can upload this. We can then say select. We can choose our colors.
Let's add a new color. And again, this is where it's good to know your hex number or your HTML color code for your logo. I'm just going to guess right now for this. We're going to add that color. We have a dark one.
I think that should be like a dark brown. I can't tell if that's a dark brown. Let's make it a brown like that. We can choose our fonts.
We can add our social links. So this could be, first of all, maybe like YouTube. I'll type in my YouTube handle, which is just youtube.com slash Santrell Media.
Central Media, we could also add social links. So if you want to add your Instagram, your Facebook, by the way, I recommend every business at the very least makes a Facebook business page. Sounds weird, but it's good for ranking on Google.
And it does act as a website. It has a lot of details. It's very searchable. And I think it works very well for a lot of businesses out there, especially local businesses, but even dropshipping.
I think it could have its advantages in this application as well. So I'm going to type in my Instagram right now, which is always going to be just Instagram. dot com slash your username. So in my case, Mike O'Brien with two N's, and we can say save brand assets.
Now, this is going to walk us through a couple key things. Let's close out of this right now. We don't need to do that. But the dashboard here is going to walk you through four main things. I think these are great because they're really four of the main things most people are going to want to do anyway with a marketing platform like this, such as collect email subscribers from your website, so people could sign up for offers and things like that.
You can then have a welcome email once people join. You can have a recover abandoned carts, like I said, and you can have some additional driving traffic there. But I'm going to go to abandoned cart recovery.
This is an automation or a workflow that I think is very important to add. I'm going to say launch workflows. And right here, we can choose.
This is where it really is pretty automated. We don't have to set much up. We can decide the discount code on our third email. In essence, the hierarchy right here says, all right, a customer is going to abandon their cart. or they're going to abandon a checkout.
Then after one hour, they get their first email. Then 11 hours later, the second email, and then another 12 hours. So the next day, they're going to get their third email. And this is where we send them a discount. So for this, let's say 10% off is going to be good for us.
We can always change this later. And then here we can say, all right, let's only use email. You could do SMS if you wanted to. You do have to look into your local laws a little bit more with SMS.
I know like in the EU, it is a bit different there. I'm going to start workflows and that will... in essence, make it for us. So we can say show my workflows.
And that's set up. So remember where I was saying that using OmniSend, you don't really need to set up discount codes as much. That's because this is able to create unique discount codes for every individual recipient. So these don't end up on like coupon cabin or you know, whatever these couponing websites out there.
Instead, it's only for people who actually are signed up for your email or actually are potentially not going to make the purchase. rather than like showing up on Honey or one of those other plugins like that. I think it's a really nice thing to have.
And if we wanna set up any other automations, just looking at automations right here, we could say create workflow. There are a lot of prebuilt ones on OmniSend. On the left side, you can see kind of the categories for them. So maybe it's like a birthday one, if it's a special occasion, if you collect emails or birthdays, say at checkout, you ask when someone's birthday is and say, we're gonna send you a little birthday present on your birthday. So.
we could go with this one right here and say, hey, just an email on their birthday. So the trigger is going to be based on their birth date. Then you can maybe nine o'clock in the morning, you'll send them something that says, hey, happy birthday from the Travel Bros. That's what it looks like.
And it gives them a 15% off discount that they can then use on your website for that day. So I think that's pretty great. Like I said, with almost no effort at all, those are both configured very, very easily.
And honestly, after using OmniSend a lot, I can say, It works incredibly well. We don't have to worry about these being buggy or anything like that. Every time I've ever used them, it's just a seamless integration with Shopify. And so like I said a couple minutes ago, if you want to get started with OmniSend, if you want to get that bonus on your online store, you can go to santralmedia.com slash OmniSend. We'll also have that as link number two in the description down below, just in case you want to go through our link to get started with OmniSend.
So going back to Shopify, we now have some marketing set up. But that is not all of our marketing. That's more of the organic side of marketing, the remarketing, the retargeting to people who already end up on our website.
But that is not the discovery aspect of it. So from a discovery side of things, you probably want to be running ads. There are a couple different ways to run ads. For example, you could get meta and that would be Facebook and Instagram ads. You could also do Snapchat.
And that's going to be another big thing that we have other full tutorials on how to do that. I have links down below. And of course we have TikTok as well. I'm going to start off by adding TikTok here.
So if we go and install TikTok, let's click on install. And actually while this is installing, let's go to, hold on. It actually is installed right now. Let's say install.
Now while it's installing, let's go to a new tab, a new tab. And here we can go to santrellmedia.com slash TikTok. This will give you some free money depending on where you are in the world.
It could give you up to $1,500 in dollar matched ad spend. So if you spend $100, you get $100. Depends on where you are in the world and when you're watching this video. So for now, I'm going to say get started.
We're going to create our account. If you already have a TikTok account, you could sign up. with TikTok. I'm going to deselect that, reselect that to agree to the terms of service.
I'm going to create a password and an email. I will then say continue and solve their little puzzle here. And once you confirm your email, we can start off with our industry.
So we are e-commerce and we are selling, I don't know, maybe health and personal care, I guess. This is the Travel Bros is our business, our phone number, enter our domain, and we can get started. Now, TikTok ads, as with any ad platform out there, may seem intimidating at first.
I have a full tutorial on this, but I'm actually going to walk you through it in this video as well, because I think it is so important to properly setting up a dropshipping business. Obviously, this is going to be a huge part of your marketing. And so I'm going to start off by typing in my state.
So I'm in Pennsylvania. We're going to do an automatic payment method. I'll say go to ads manager. And this changes from time to time as well. Don't be alarmed if the interface looks slightly different.
But somewhere on here, it should bring you to a three-step process, your campaign, your ad group, and your ad. And this is a hierarchy. I figured I'd find some Google images to kind of explain it to you a little bit better. So you'll have your campaign at the very top. That's going to be this store is the campaign, right?
That's a common way to do it is for the individual product. And then within that, you'll have different ad groups. Each ad group might be something like a different audience.
It might be a different, like, it could be really anything you want. But typically, audiences are going to be the difference there. And you have different ads within each ad group.
And each individual ad is just a slightly different vertical video that you record. This could be maybe a different actor in there. This could be a different script. This could be subtitles versus no subtitles, music versus no music.
You want to have a lot of ads in each ad group. So you can really test out and find out what is going to work best. But I figured maybe some of these images might be a better way to kind of explain that to you.
But going back here, like I said, campaign, ad group, ad. Starting off. with the campaign. What is our advertising objective that we have here?
We are looking for website conversions. You'd think product sales, but we're not selling on TikTok shop. So we actually want website conversions right here.
I'm going to select website conversions and say continue. You'll see no website is actually connected. So going back to our Shopify tab, it should have brought you to this page right here once it installed TikTok on there.
Now we have two options for this. We can set up growing your business on TikTok using the ads, which is what we want to do, or selling on TikTok shop. Now, be cautious with this. TikTok does have some rules, at least at the time of filming this video, where anything sold on TikTok shop needs to have inventory at the same location as the business selling it.
So basically, that means dropshipping as of right now is not really allowed on TikTok shop. It's a little bit like it's becoming more of a gray area, but it's something that I would recommend, you know, don't do that or at the very least proceed with great caution before starting that. We want to do TikTok advertising here. So I'm going to say set up now. And really all this is doing is installing what is called a pixel on our Shopify store, which means I'm going to kind of click through this as I explain this, which means that when somebody comes to our online store, it is going to track what they do.
So are this person added to the cart? They typed in their details. They didn't make the purchase and they came from this ad over here, or they came from a different ad and they did make a purchase. And the idea here is that using this information, TikTok and Shopify are able to work together.
to figure out which ads convert the best and ultimately give you data to help you decide which is actually going to be the best ads to add style to run and which products are going to work the best so again i'm just going to say confirm leave that on maximum we want as much data as possible here and then down here company information we'll say finish setup and now that should be configured we now have this connected to tick tock going back to that other tab the tick tock ads manager we may need to reload this We don't need to reload this. We can simply click the dropdown here and we should now see our Shopify store showing up. I'm gonna click on that. And the optimization event, we can choose really any of these.
You can optimize for how many people add to the cart, how many people complete the payment or initiate the checkout. Ultimately, what matters most to me is people who are actually making purchases. So I'm going to say complete payment. That is going to be the metric. I want that to be successful when there's actually a payment that is coming into my Shopify balance.
Going down here, we can have automatic payments, targeting. We can really kind of narrow down the audience a little bit more. This is the first ad group we have, which, by the way, we should name at the very top. I'm just going to name this ad group 1-broad. I'm going to keep that kind of broad.
I'm not going to narrow it down too much. And then down here, this is where we can kind of decide what's going to happen. So is this only in the United States or are you selling anywhere else in the world?
What aid groups are you selling to? I recommend leaving this disabled. Don't sell to minors.
It gets a lot trickier when you're marketing to minors. I mean, this is not legal advice, but I would recommend just always advertise to only adults. It's going to be a much better setup for you.
Also, more likely to have more disposable income anyway. Down here, you can choose only one gender if you wanted to. So if this was something that was like, I don't know, men's underwear, you might want to have one ad group that just sells to men and one that has a slightly different ad that only sells to women.
And maybe it's like, hey, women, like get this for your husband for Christmas or something. And maybe a slightly different ad format you'd have for men. So that's where you probably switch this right here.
Otherwise, for this product, I'm obviously just going to leave it set to all. And we can customize some other things. Somehow TikTok manages to know.
the spending power and the household income of different accounts it's very impressive how they're able to figure that out but you could say hey maybe just high spending power we want those people to be able to purchase this product so let's not waste our money advertising to anybody who doesn't have high spending power and so maybe that would make sense for you we can then choose our budget right here and i'm just going to leave it at 70 that looks good to me for now and our optimization goal again conversion we can have a target cpa if you want to That's not something in the very beginning I'm going to do, but eventually I will dial in a target CPA. Once we have some more data on how much it's probably going to cost for a lot of these ads, which ones convert better, we'll eventually come back to this. So I'm going to say next.
And that brings us to the individual ads down here. And this is where most people do get quite intimidated. We have really three main options, maybe four options for how to set up your ad.
The first one is going to be. Just you filming an ad by yourself. And I have a video explaining how to do that.
It's great because it doesn't cost you any money. You can make a lot of different ads and really test them all out. But the downside is that you do need to kind of have, there's a learning curve, right?
You have to figure out how to film the ads and how to do everything yourself. And of course, have that camera presence that will be convincing and will drive sales. So the second option for an ad is going to be what's called UGC.
So if we look up UGC, which is user generated content, you'll see just some examples of it. It's really all I'm looking for here. But in essence, it would be, maybe images are going to show it pretty well. It's going to be people that are making an ad.
So they're just regular people. They're users is what they're meant to look like. And they're just going to be talking about what your product is. It feels very organic.
So it's not going to be like a big Coca-Cola ad or anything like that. It's going to be much more laid back, which does perform quite well on TikTok. Really this format right here. I think you've seen a lot of ads that look like this, just people talking about specific products.
And there are platforms you can go to pay people to do this. Sometimes it can get very expensive. And so the third option that we think is actually really interesting, it's getting better and better. One that I found is called ArcAds, arcads.ai.
So this is going to be link number six in the description down below. This is not an affiliate link or anything. I have nothing to gain from recommending this. And honestly, I think there may be other better platforms out there.
But for my testing, I was beyond impressed with this right here. So you do have to pay for each individual one. But in essence, what you do is you write your script.
And you can either write it yourself or have ChatGPT write it or even have this help you write it. And then it'll have an AI actor speak and kind of make it feel very natural and go through what your ad is. Now, this does not actually show your product in the video. It only shows a person talking. So what I would recommend doing is showing that and then...
Film your own B-roll. So maybe you want to order a product and film or just have some images and just show them throughout the ad. So we do have products.
So we do have images of our product. If we go back to here, we have a ton of images that we can use. So you can either just use these images in the ads or just, you know, buy the product yourself and just kind of film a little bit yourself. And then because you're not speaking, you're not in the ad, you don't have to worry about that aspect of it.
You just need to worry about stitching it together. Like here's an example from a completely different video I made where I was selling a golf ball recovery tool on those a drop shipping video. And let's just watch this and you'll see just how unbelievably realistic this actually is.
I love golf, but I'm no Tiger Woods. I used to lose five golf balls a day. Ever since I saw the viral TikTok golf ball recovery tool, I started finding dozens of Titleist Pro V1 balls and haven't bought a single golf ball in over a year. This thing is sick.
Check it out. It extends to a full nine feet, helping you recover your golf balls from ponds, creeks, and even thorny hazards. With its yellow plastic ball grabber and spring-loaded ball lock, So this one's a little bit slower, but I just thought that was like just unbelievable that that is not a real person saying that right now. It's an AI, you know, based on like I just it's crazy what what the technology has actually come to.
So that's ARK ads right there. You could make ads on there. But like I said, because it is just a guy walking, I would want to show maybe every other three seconds.
So maybe like three seconds showing this three seconds with the same audio in the background, but showing on top of this, maybe like a little video I filmed with my iPhone. of the actual product being used or something like that. And this is something that you can edit yourself very, very easily in a software called CapCut.
So if I type in CapCut on my laptop, I have that software available. It's actually owned by ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok. So it's free to use.
It's basically the TikTok editor. And it's available both on desktop, on your phone. So phone editing is probably the easier way to do that.
So that is your third option. on how to make an ad right here but going back to tick tock ads once we have those ads available so i'm just going to use that that golf ball recovery one just as an example here all we want to do is go down to upload let's click on plus upload we'll upload a file i'm going to find that over in this folder right here so there's my arc ads one i'm going to open that and we can say continue we can also create a custom identity so this is going to be at the travel travel bros i'll change this little icon there Now we have our logo and the Travel Bros. We'll say save and that's going to show up on the bottom of your ad down here and over on the right side.
So that's kind of what your ad is starting to look like right now. We can also add some more details if we wanted to have, for example, any carousel images. You can have that instead of a single video.
I think videos seem to work better, at least for me personally. But, you know, other niches, other people, other markets might be better off using carousels. It's also very easy to use carousels as well. there are also some other interactive add-ons this always changes like tick tock's really testing this out and evolving very very quickly but you have three options right here display card countdown sticker and gift card code i like the gift card code right there or the gift code card sorry uh so we can say create and maybe for this one is going to be like a discount code of let's just say this is going to be um save 10 percent today save 10 today The gift code could be, like I said, fall 10. We can have a different sticker color here, so it's more visible.
And because he's down in the bottom, I want to put this probably up on the top, so it's not in the way. We'll give it a black background like that. We can change the placement and let's just say confirm.
And you'll see that's going to show up so somebody can copy that code when they make the purchase. And this kind of gives them more of an incentive to go and make the purchase through the ad rather than just thinking about it and maybe buying it later. So like, oh, well, this is really interesting. 10 off like sure let's copy that code and let's go check it out let's do that down here the destination where is it going to send them we want to send them to our product page so let's go back to the travel bros and we can go down to online store click on the view button it'll bring us to a new tab here let's click on shop let's find the product this is the product here i'm going to highlight and copy the link and then go back to tick tock and of course and of course i'm going to paste that product link right here and then of course we have to select this ad contains AI generated content that's going to have a little disclaimer on the bottom that's very important of course we have to agree to this right here and then down on the bottom there's not a whole lot else I'm going to change so I'm going to say submit oh actually then we do need to have some text so here we want a little call to action so we'll say submit we can add a payment method to run this ad I'll say submit it's processing the request we can say confirm in the little pop-up right here just going to authenticate our payment Our payment method was added and I can close this window right here.
So now it's creating the ad. It might take a minute to do this and it'll bring us automatically over to a dashboard where we can see. So if you say back to campaigns, we'll see all of our ads and everything we can kind of manage from here.
So on the top, we have three tabs. We have our campaign, we have our ad groups, and we have our ads. So if we want to make another ad, what I recommend doing is using a lot of the same stuff and just really altering some part of it. So maybe you change the title, maybe you change the call to action, maybe you change the video itself but you keep everything else the same so we can click on this we can actually not click on that sorry we click on copy right here it'll make a copy in the exact same ad group and campaign we can make two copies if we wanted to so let's say copy and it's going to make those duplicates now so we'll say got it and for these we can change a different ad name so it's going to be like add we could say guy walking ad number two And we could change maybe just one little thing in here, maybe the call to action.
So keep in mind, by default, it's giving us a ton of call to actions. Maybe apply now doesn't make sense. Interested, visit store, watch now doesn't make sense. View now, check it out now, learn more. Maybe we do want read more.
We want shop now. We want book now. We don't want book now.
We want, yeah. Maybe pre-order now is another option as well. So that looks pretty good. We can go with those right there and we can change maybe here.
We're going to have some different text there and we can say publish all. So now we'll have this ad. Of course, you want to customize all of them, but this is making multiple different ads that are all going to run.
And this is how you kind of manage your variations. So let's go back to campaigns. And by the way, if you ever decide, hey, I don't want to spend money on this one anymore. You can simply toggle it off and that ad will no longer be running.
In addition. Don't worry if in the beginning it says not delivering. That is because our account is currently in review.
So it might take a couple hours until these start delivering. I typically just make sure I set everything up right. I have the right budget, so it's not going to spend like all my money. And then I go to bed and I wake up and usually these ads are already running. So I'm going to leave these so we can leave these enabled.
Also, if you go over to ad group, you can make another ad group in a similar way, or you could disable or enable an entire ad group like that. Same thing over here. on campaign as well so that's how you do everything through tick tock like i said i highly recommend checking out arc ads uh if you find any others that are even better ai ad generators please do leave a comment down below i think it's so fascinating to see just how good these ads are actually becoming like this guy just walking down his sidewalk uh and just like i don't know if it's a lip sync thing they're doing it's just so convincing that that guy's actually talking about the product that that i have right here so let's go back to shopify what do we have so far we have our products we have our store we have everything set up on zendrop let's talk about setting up a sample order i don't know why it added a password when i changed my domain a little while ago but a couple other things to note is you'll see right here the loading speed right now moderate you want it to maybe be a little faster and you can always reduce the sizes of your images and things like that throughout your website uh interactivity good visual stability it says that's poor so it is something we could potentially work on to create a better user experience and to potentially rank higher in google but like i said let's place that sample order you could do it directly through zendrop but i want to place it through our store so we can really get the full experience of using the store that an end customer would actually get that way we can identify any possible bugs or anything like that even better off would be to do this on your phone i'm doing it on my laptop because that's what the screen recording is set up with right now but let's go through this order right here so i'm going to say add to cart but let's just check out buy it now and see what that looks like first buy it now it'll bring you directly to the cart and you can see on the top all of our different payment methods i'm going to go back though and i want to add this to cart let's go through the full process here over on the right side it says you're 54 away from free shipping so we do know we will have to pay for shipping i'm actually just going to do one i don't want to order two so now we actually have to get a hundred dollars for free shipping total um that's something whatever i understand um that's how we set this up and that's kind of And instead of that, maybe I want to change.
Maybe I want it to be $50 for free shipping because ordering four of this, even four, you'd have to get five of this to get free shipping there. So I don't know. I don't think anyone's really going to be ordering five of this.
We can change that free shipping threshold over in settings. Let's say checkout now. And from your checkout page, you'll see Amazon pay is now available there. So you've got shop pay, PayPal, Google pay.
Actually, we didn't set up PayPal. So I'm not sure how that's actually working. And we have Amazon pay as well.
or Venmo. So a lot of ways people can pay us or they can just enter their credit card information down here. And again, shop pay PayPal things down there as well.
But let's say Amazon pay just to see how that actually works. You can simply sign into your Amazon account, we can say sign in, and it's going to choose our payment method and our shipping address. It's going to say, is this correct?
I'll say yes, continue to check out. And there you go. It's really easy. Everything's set up.
All you have to do is say pay now. And that order has been completed. It's pretty crazy how easy that is when you have something like Amazon pay set up.
But as you can see, the checkout or the kind of confirmation page here, they give us a confirmation number. They say thank you. They show us a little map right there.
And then down here, they'll show us the order details, as well as on the right side, the overall price of the shipping, the product, the subtotal, and the overall price. So $27.85 for this organizer, this men's traveling organizer. I think that's really not a terrible price. I think this is going to be something that could potentially sell very well. But it doesn't automatically fulfill until we set up the settings correctly.
So let's close out of this tab and let's go back to Zendrop. There are a couple ways to get to Zendrop. Of course, you could just go to the domain. What I'm going to do is go down to apps, go to Zendrop here, and that'll open up Zendrop in a new tab automatically. So if we go down to orders, you'll see the new order does appear.
It's order number 1001. That's how we set them to kind of be numbered. The date was today. Customer was me. the order was received it is not yet paid and we could fulfill the order now what i recommend doing maybe in the beginning you want to fulfill them automatically or manually sorry and we could just say you know add a credit uh we're going to fulfill the order that's something you could do in the very beginning. Instead, I would really recommend the whole point of dropshipping is to be automated. And we have two great tools up here.
One, we have the branding tool. So you can create a thank you card that could give a discount that could, you know, again, incentivize more purchases. And I think that's very professional. Maybe in the beginning, you can't afford that. So you don't do that right away.
But the auto fulfillment is a feature that I highly, highly recommend. So I'm going to say on that means that as soon as somebody places the order. to maximize the shipping speed so you don't have to go on here and check every single day you want to have auto fulfillment configured pretty much immediately i think that's really a great way to do things so so turn on auto fulfillment in the future they will be fulfilled but because this one here has not been fulfilled yet i'm going to fulfill this order right now so i'm going to say fulfill order it says success i'm going to say okay then down here we have to kind of go through this say accept and we now paid zendrop 7.27 for this order to be purchased and to be shipped it's saying processing and then this will keep us updated too as it's actually shipped out so we can know more about this in case we get any complaints or any kind of messages from customers or just if we're wondering for ourselves to see how things are going as long as you see green you're all good you want to see green on every single line here for all of these orders so yeah now we have that order placed the money will be coming into our shopify balance so if we go to finance finance is right here We can see balance right there, net sales $22.95, gross profit $20.65.
It doesn't actually know how much it actually costs. We'll have to change the cost in our settings here, but this will actually be added to your balance. If we go to Shopify balance then, in case you're wondering how to get this money out, one thing that Shopify really pushes you to do, they really want you to get a balance card.
They really want you to get this little like Shopify balance card. I think it's like a debit card. I've actually never used it.
I always just offload the balance. with payouts down here. I always just send that over to my bank account.
And it's something that you can do quite easily on Shopify. I do that typically once every other week with open stores. But going down to analytics, you'll see this is where you can learn a lot more about your store, not just from what we talked about with the TikTok ads or from OmniSend.
Both of those will have their own analytics as well. And Zendrop, every platform we've dealt with throughout this video has analytics. But Shopify is going to be particularly interesting to me. because you can see how many people visited your online store or how many online store sessions there were so i visited this store like 12 times in this video so you'll see 12 sessions right there currently it'll show us how many sales there are it'll show us the average order value the return customers the devices that were used again because i'm on desktop they're all desktop i would be incredibly surprised if you had anything more than like 25 desktop i think for most people especially running tick tock ads it is going to be 100 percent mobile using your website, but maybe an occasional desktop here and there.
As we get more traffic and more data in here, you'll see a lot of these will start to populate what products are selling better than others, what the customer analysis looks like, and different things like that. So that's my summary of how to set up drop shipping in the easiest way possible. Again, the Shopify Zendrop combo is really a killer combo that allows you to set up the store with almost no effort at all, find products very easily, integrate those products and start getting sales with very, very little effort. And then more time can be spent on optimizing those ads and having AI make different versions of those ads. So you can figure out what is doing well, what kind of ad script you want to write in which ad or which AI character to actually use, as well as which products, as we have tons of products available, which products are actually going to be the better sellers on your store thank you for watching and the next video i recommend watching i'll link a couple like one right here for how to set up tick tock ads in more detail another one here with more details on how to use shopify if you want to customize your store more but i wish you all the best of luck thanks for watching i'm michael bryant with santral media and i'll see you in one of those next two videos